Busking with Billy Bragg

Billy Bragg and Frank Turner went busking together in King's Cross yesterday to raise money for Shelter.

Bragg and Turner positioned themselves in Granary Square and raised more than £1,200 in donations taken in collection buckets.

The pair played a number of tracks, including takes on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence and The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset.

On the surface they make an unlikely pairing, both in terms of their age and class background. Bragg, 55, has been a Leftie activist since the miners' strike of the Eighties, while Turner is an Eton boy aged a mere 31.

But they have come together through folk music and a shared social conscience, shocked at the dreadful statistic of 80,000 children waking up on Christmas morning homeless and in temporary accommodation.

"It's pretty gross that in a society as wealthy as ours there are people who don't have a basic roof over their heads," Turner said to The Independent earlier this week.

Tonight they are doing a special charity show for Shelter at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London.